A natural material can be associated with an IC card for authentication and identification. In this respect, a publication titled “Smart Biometrics for Trust and Convenience,” Eurosmart, December 2010, discloses biometrics for authenticating and securely identifying, while taking in consideration several aspects, such as electronic ID, access passes, payment, and information such as emails and database records, and important paper documents, for example.
The above publication further mentions inanimate objects and even artificial objects among entities in which biometrics can be applied. Any “natural phenomenon for elements whose characteristics are chaotic and measurable” is defined as a biometric object. According to other sources, natural phenomena not related to a biological material may have different designations, e.g., physical unduplicated features (cfr. IEEE 10.1109/ICASSP.2011. 5946831).
A product, known as Prooftag™, uses air bubbles for authentication. This product overcomes the drawbacks of prior art authentication methods by using randomly generated air bubbles for authentication, which is unique in its form factors. Prior art authentication methods are based on mass-produced, and consequently, mass-reproducible methods.
However, Prooftag™ itself has several drawbacks. During the phase of authentication, each bubble tag is associated with a unique identifier stored in a database of a system operator. An Internet connection to such a database is required for any authentication, and the authentication cannot be executed if the connection is not available.
Another drawback of Prooftag™ is that it is configured to be attached to a product or to an IC card, and the attached tag can be detached during the delivery of the product, i.e., before the authentication of the product. In fact, the detached tag can be associated with another product if the consumer buying the first product did not perform or complete the authentication process. Moreover, a tag attached to an IC card makes the surface of the IC card non-planar and protruding with respect to the surface.